Very often when a dear friend or
acquaintance tells me of a lengthy gut-wrenching story, when it comes time for
me to talk I try to always start with “Are you asking for my advice?” And here
they stop. If she’s crying, then she abruptly stops. If she is not, then her
eyes dart around madly, and the conversation shifts… Thusly I am let off the
hook and the relationship remains intact. This won’t be that kind of
conversation, Dear Reader, because you did not ask my advice.

First and foremost, I don’t know if these
actually exist because I have never attended one, but I have been privy to a
“debut” or debutante ball for Kansas
“society” and if I had to guess, a purity ball is its hardscrabble cousin. If a
debutante ball is an event that is attended by a young female, ready to be
presented to society as marriageable often accompanied by a military date, then
a purity ball is an event that a young girl will attend for much the same
reason, but she will attend with her father.

Evangelical Christians, differently from
other types of Christians who are followers of the teaching of Jesus, believe
in a very strict textual analysis of the entire Bible as an indicaton of GOD’s
law for humans on earth. Let me unpack that a bit: Unlike Catholics, who
believe that Jesus “made all things new” and that civil and moral law begins
with his brief yet effective parables, Fundamentalists spend hundreds of hours
and millions of dollars researching the language of the Bible from earliest
Judiaism (ironically) to derive meaning from a book that has been translated,
lost, found, lost and found again easily 40 times before it ever arrived in
English. They do not give creedence to other books written by equally important
authors at comparative times, nor do they believe any of the essential meaning
of the English version has been lost in translation. Their fervency is ultimately what binds them
together both in marriage in and in creating extremely effective religious
lobbies in politics. One must understand this ambient background noise to fully
comprehend where Purity Balls fit in.

The only problem with textual analysis of
the Bible is that it is inherently biased and always fraught with error.
Evangelicals are painted into a corner because as new evidence arises they have
only narrow places to put it, causing, as we have seen, panic, hatred and fear
whenever any issue is re-conditioned for a changing society. As a result of
this textual analysis the religion is extremely inflexible and allows for only
an ultra specific margin of society to be accepted. All of this prelude should
not indicate that I think they are “wrong”, I’m just laying the framework for
my opinion, which comes next…

It’s weird to kiss your parents on the
mouth. It’s not illegal and it’s not wrong, it’s just weird to do it and weird
to be photographed doing it. That was my first thought when I was peering
through the portraits of young girls in what used to be known as cotillion
dresses, or party frocks as my grandmother who was raised in La Belle Epoque
would say.

At best a Purity Ball is a reaction to a
world that is changing too fast for people who liked it the way it was. At
worst a Purity Ball is a role-reversing sea change of confusion that places the Lord
as a young girls “husband”, her father as her “boyfriend” and any other
swinging dick as an interloper. The child, ranging in age from 4 to 18, signs a
Purity Covenant that she will behave in a demure manner and that her father is
the protector of her virginity.

Ah! There, I said it! Her virginity. The
secret trading card of vagina controllers the world over.

Remember father-daughter dances? Remember
how charming that sounded? At least for me, a girl without a father. The word
chaste is actually a better word than purity, but chaste doesn’t make you think of a
fresh mountain stream the way purity does. The world has undergone a lot of changes
since the 1980s when Purity Balls first popped up. Same sex people can now
legally get married and enjoy partner’s benefits, the internet bleeds actual
porn into regular media at an increasingly faster rate and the gap between rich
and poor is widening. All of these socio-economic factors allow social mores to
become de-stabilized. As Man searches for meaning, he will sort for sameness,
he will look for those who best resemble himself, and he will allow his world
to become very small if it means he has a greater sense of control. One of the
first things we see in societies where mens traditional positions are
threatened is an attack on a woman’s agency. Everything from school attendance,
to job security, to government benefits to sexual choice (from when it happens,
to where it happens, to who is happens with, and what to do after it happens)
will be curtailed. And it will always be shrouded in a big white fluffy gorgeous
veil and called … God’s purpose, or religion, or duty.

As such, these men do not consciously
understand that they are emotionally damaging otherwise capable beings and I
can see how that would happen. We live in the golden age of the dick pic and if
I was a parent of a daughter between 8 and 18 and I am not sure I would allow
her to have the internet or even a cell phone with text messages. Thanks to the
invasiveness of handheld devices, young girls and women are TOO available to
any man with thumbs. It is a function of popularity – oh so crucial in small
societies – to be this available. It is a function of the tribal nature of
teenagers to keep secrets from parents, an actual growth stage in the healthy
development of independent people. It is next to impossible to balance being
completely clear with your parents about the state of your hymen while
remaining necessarily opaque about the state of your friends. This process is
bound to fail and with it the embedded identity of what a good girl is (she is
a virgin), what a good woman is (until she meets her husband), what a good wife
is (and then only has sex when he wants it), what a good sex partner is (and
learns to enjoy his response speed and his tastes).

This how you burden a pack animal to carry
an enormous amount of emotional baggage for the rest of its life. All of Mans
tangled feelings and insecurities and things unsaid about sex, desire, lust,
love, romance and ego wrapped tightly, tightly into bite-size amounts and fed
week after week month after month and year after year in to the precious brains
of their own children. It’s like a form of child abuse that comes from
attachment but it is not love. These young girls are being trained from a very
early age that they are their fathers property, that their sexual history is
not and can never be considered private, but rather a resume of their moral fiber,
that their flesh is their only real value. Once deflowered, it will be their
beauty and quietness in self-sacrifice that keeps them valuable, once old they
will either be divorced (look at the stats) or widowed which is the surest root
to poverty that man has ever created, but here Dear Reader comes an important
stage because here and for a brief moment before they die, they will be judged
by others who chose to see on the state of their character.